Oct 30, 2009

Excerpt 5 - Biotech

This
is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my
time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts." (If you want to
read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the
right labeled "excerpts from the book.") Comments and factual quibbles
are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:
fact.check.baker@gmail.com. If you're dying to order the book, send
mail to the same address. I'm still looking for an agent and a
publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too.

--Stewart Baker

If
jet travel and computers were the ghosts of technologies past and
present, biotechnology is a specter that haunts the future. It became
my personal nightmare while serving on the Robb-Silberman commission.
The United States agreed to give up biological weapons in the 1970s.
And it stopped all work on them at that time. The Russians signed the
same treaty but if anything they expanded their biological weapons
programs, making ever more loathsome and unstoppable diseases. Little
wonder then that their client states and allies, like Iraq, also had
biological programs.

Most
troubling from an intelligence point of view, our spies had little or
no insight into these programs, in Russia or in Iraq, until defectors
revealed them. It was just too easy to hide them, in medical or
insecticide factories, say, or in anonymous laboratories in obscure
cities.

Just
as bad, the death and demoralization that biological weapons cause
can be equivalent to a nuclear detonation. That made it crucial that
we do a better job of tracking foreign governments’ illicit
biological programs, as the Robb-Silberman commission recommended.

But
that wasn’t the scariest part. What scared me was how rapidly the
ability to make biological weapons is being democratized.
Biotechnology is growing as fast as jet travel and computers. The
cost and difficulty of biological engineering is being reduced at an
exponential rate.

And
scientists’ ability to build dangerous organisms is increasing just
as fast. In 2005, the deadly 1918 flu virus was rebuilt from scratch.
Smallpox has been eradicated in the wild; it is more dangerous to
humankind than ever, now that vaccinations have stopped. It has not
been synthesized, at least not that we know of. But the failure to
recreate smallpox is now a matter of choice, not capability. Larger
and more complex organisms have already been created, and the cost
and difficulty of assembling such DNA sequences keeps dropping.

In
fact, the current state of the art has moved from viruses (which some
would describe as less than living) to bacteria. In 2008, scientists
assembled the entire DNA sequence for a small bacterium that causes
urinary tract infections.

Of
course, you have to be really talented to assemble that large a
sequence. Only a handful of labs could accomplish that feat today.
But Moore’s law will do soon do for DNA synthesis what it did for
mainframes. DNA experiments that were once the province only of big
institutions with sophisticated staffs will in a few years be the
playground of smart high school kids.

Indeed,
that’s the dream of a lot of influential and wealthy industry
leaders. The people who lived through the information revolution
would like the biotech revolution to be a straight replay -- complete
with DNA hackers operating out of their parents’ garage, DNA
synthesis IPOs, and “open source” DNA coding languages. They’re
not concerned that biotech and synthetic DNA haven’t really
delivered big improvements in human health yet. Massively
democratizing computer power was good for all of us, they say,
pointing to the results of the personal computer and the Internet.
Why shouldn’t the mass democratization of DNA synthesis also
produce an outpouring of creativity, playfulness, and unexpected
progress? Besides, they conclude, it’s going to happen whether we
like it or not, so we might as well get on the bandwagon.

But
you don’t have to be Cassandra, or Ned Ludd, to see that a world
where millions of people can make smallpox from scratch might turn
out to be a dangerous place.

That's
not a future that wants to kill you; that’s a future that could
kill you in a fit of adolescent pique.